


Sisterhood

by Gyptian



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Canon Trans Character, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Sister-Sister Relationship, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27324241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gyptian/pseuds/Gyptian
Summary: Cam has never apologised for her sister. Max does.5+1 fic about sororal affection
Relationships: Charlie Cameron & Jenna Cameron
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	Sisterhood

1.

Mom and dad showed off the baby picture album a lot. Too often, Jenna thought. She didn’t like it when adults looked at her, wet and naked and six months old, and told her what a cute baby she had been. She wasn’t a baby now. She wasn’t cute, then or now. Cute was for girls that liked dresses. Not Jenna.

  
  


Charlie also didn’t like it, but didn’t say why. 

  
  


Charlie just got real quiet, sometimes.

  
  


Jenna also thought the adults were stupid because, while her pink-blob baby-self was called a cute girl, Charlie’s pink-blob baby-self was called a handsome boy. Even when they got them confused in the pictures. They couldn’t tell them apart! They were babies! 

  
  


Maybe it was that adults played pretend a lot. Like when mom said she was okay to dad, when she had been crying all day. Like when aunt Gilda and uncle Steve were called a ‘happily married couple’ when they hated each other.

  
  


Jenna didn’t mind that adults played pretend. She _did_ mind that they made her play along.

  
  


Sometimes she took out the baby picture album of her and Charlie so she could look at the pictures by herself. So she could remember what was the truth, when all the adult pretending made her memory fuzzy.

  
  


Her mom had tried to explain about twins, about identical and fraternal. They said she and Charlie were different. 

  
  


She looked at the picture of herself in a pink swimming diaper and Charlie in a blue swimming diaper. It was their first time in the blow-up pool dad put up in the backyard under a big umbrella every May, so they could swim when it was hot. 

  
  


She traced their outlines with her finger an inch above the pictures, like her mom showed her.

  
  


Charlie looked just like her. Plus, how could they be fraternal if they weren’t brothers? She had looked up 'fraternal' in the fat dictionary that sat on the bottom shelf of the walnut bookcase in the living room. Where mom put all the boring books.

  
  


Charlie came up behind her all quiet. On cat feet, her mom often said. “What are you doing?”

  
  


Jenna heaved a deep sigh. “I think mom’s wrong. I think we’re identical twins. Or maybe sororal twins. Cause we're sisters, not brothers.”

  
  


Charlie was quiet, so Jenna looked up to see if it was a good or a bad silence. The big smile said it was a very good silence. Jenna felt very proud. Charlie’s silences were usually good, when it was just the two of them. 

  
  


Later, at dinner, Charlie proclaimed they were not fraternal twins, when mom compared them to the brother-and-sister twins the two-doors-to-the-left neighbours had adopted. Mom insisted Charlie apologise. Charlie pointed at her, “But Jenna said!”

  
  


Mom looked at her with large, betrayed eyes. Probably because she wasn’t playing along with the adults… again. Well, Jenna was tired of pretending, anyway. So she said what the cops said on TV. “The evidence speaks for itself.”

  
  


Mom got all red and puffed up. “I never thought you’d play along with Charlie’s lies and games, Jenna! Apologise! Both of you! Or you'll go to bed without dessert!”

  
  


That was the first time she refused to apologise for Charlie.

2.

Jenna stopped dead at the sight of Charlie surrounded by five boys in the schoolyard. There wasn’t a teacher watching. Too early for that. Mom sometimes dropped them off at seven if she had to go help auntie when she fell over and broke a bone. Auntie did that a lot.

  
  


“You too wimpy to play with us, huh, Charlie, gotta sit with the girls all the time?”

  
  


Jenna almost groaned when she could see Charlie swell with indignation. 

  
  


An hour, a scolding and a black eye later, Jenna sat next to a sober Charlie, who kept a thousand yard stare aimed at the beige wall as they waited for the principal to call them into his office.

  
  


“They still don’t get it,” Charlie said softly.

  
  


Jenna grasped her sister’s hand. “Remember when we were in kindergarten? We decided that you must be a secret girl?”

  
  


Charlie snorted. “Yeah. All the other kids seemed so dumb.” She sighed deeply. “You always got it, even when mom and dad didn’t. I thought adults were just too stupid.”

  
  


“Old-fashioned.” 

  
  


“Stodgy.”

  
  


“Boring.”

  
  


Charlie giggled and Jenna smiled in satisfaction. A thundercloud entered the hall and extinguished the light moment between them. “Mr Cameron?”

  
  
With an eyeroll, Charlie stood and strolled into the office. Jenna shot up and darted after her, but the principal blocked the doorway. “Not yet, Ms. Cameron. I wish to have a word with your brother first.”

  
  
Jenna looked up at him mulishly. Charlie’s shoulders had already rounded again, behind the man’s dusty blue jacket. “But…”

  
  
“ No, Ms. Cameron. Please wait here until your parents arrive.” The man, larger and more powerful than her growing body, closed the door in her face. She didn’t dare use her fists on it. She’d already had more detentions than mom liked. She’d gotten such a telling-off.

  
  
A snigger behind her had her turning around. Jimmy, the redhead from the group who went after Charlie whenever they could. “Your brother needs his little sister to defend him. Lame.”

  
  


Jenna, already shaking with indignation at the adult, saw red. Before she knew it, she was holding a sore hand and Jimmy was on the floor clutching a bloody nose and wailing his little heart out. The office door flew open. “Ms. Cameron!” the man said scandalised.

  
  


Jenna stared up at him, and refused to apologise for punching her sister’s bully. Refused to apologise for trying to support her sister and refused, most of all, to call her sister anything but her sister, stupid bullies and adults be damned.  


  
Charlie rolled her eyes, later, when they were alone, behind the creosote bush at the back of the garden. “You’re worse than me.”   


Jenna shrugged.

  
  
“ I don’t need you to defend me.”

  
  


Jenna snorted. “No, but I really needed to punch someone.”  
  


Charlie shook her head. “We need to be more clever about this.”  
  


“ Why?”  
  


“ They’re.... They’re starting to talk to me, saying I’m sick, maybe I need therapy.” Charlie shook her head. “He was gonna tell mom and dad that…” She bit her lip. 

  
  


“That again.” Jenna stared off into the distance. “So, what then?”

  
  


“We need to keep it a secret. Like… like when we were young. I need to be a secret girl, for now.”

  
  


“ Okay. For now.” They shook on it.  


  
3\. 

  
“ That’s a boy’s name!” Jimmy yelled in her face.  
  


“ Is not!” she responded to his every “Is too!”

They were eleven and twelve and at a school dance. She’d agreed to wear a poofy pink dress, if it meant she could have horse-riding lessons later. Charlie had pretended to have a head cold. She was getting really good at that.  


“ Why can’t I just call you Jenna?”  


“ Because I’m Cam. We’re in middle school now, Jimmy. Different school, different name.”  


It was true… a little. The real truth is that the boys tried to call Charlie Cam and she was ill at ease with it. Cam had decided she liked it though. Jenna was a name for a girl that liked dresses and played with dolls. Cam was a name for a girl that rode horses and shot desperados at high noon. So they had agreed that she’d be Cam.

Puberty had put paid to their secret-girl pact. Charlie was a girl, Cam had a sister, this was their truth and they were going to live it unapologetically.

  
  


Jimmy agreed to call her Cam if she let him hold her hand for the next week. She didn’t realise he told everyone they were boyfriend and girlfriend until Charlie told her.  
  


She confronted him when he came out of the Math classroom. “I’m not your girlfriend.”

  
  


Jimmy looked over her shoulder and then sneered at her. “You two are sick, both of you.”

  
  


“Don’t talk about my sister that way!” they both yelled. Cam looked over her shoulder and explosive-fist-bumped Charlie. Then looked back at Jimmy. She wondered if horseriding had been worth all this hassle. Then she remembered the smooth brown coat she got to brush, and the smell of the leather saddle as she put it on the horse, and soft lips that had nipped at her shoulder.

  
  


She about-faced, grasped her sister’s hand and walked away, not heeding the shoulting boy behind her.  


4.

They go to see Frozen each night that Charlie is in town. Cam arranges an extension for her paper from her professor by implying it’s that time of the moon, painful, he wouldn’t want details where other students can hear. Red in the face, he stutters out she has an extra week. Charlie has taught her well, in taking creative, subtle revenge on prejudiced people in power.

  
  


When they both want to go a third time, they decide to go in style. Since neither of them has more than pocket change to spare, Charlie’s generous salary mostly gobbled up by it being garnished for her towering fines, they hit up the dollar store and the charity shop.

  
  


A brown colour wash for Cam, an embroidered shirt and a forest green skirt. She adds her own cowboy boots and braids her hair over both shoulders. A floor-length ice-blue gown for Charlie, and a loose French braid over one shoulder. She’s become an expert at make-up now that her flesh sits easier on her bones, transfigured by a soul that shines with the truth of herself, regardless of what people around her say. Sometimes she jokes that she saves up for some subtle sculpting, is art in the making.

  
  


No one else dresses up. It’s a week night in a small theatre in a college town. They buy a pass, half the price of buying tickets for the rest of the week, and walk in, arm in arm. A few passers-by fail to be subtle while they snap pictures. Charlie preens.

  
  


They sit wide-eyed through the movie, again. 

  
  


Cam croons “Do you want to build a snowman?” at Charlie, who points out the painting of Joan of Arc that she missed last time. 

  
  


Charlie cries, as she will each time they go to see it, when Elsa conjures her palace and belts out her power ballad, Cam’s hand in both of hers. 

  
  


They mutter a lot of imprecations at every silly man in the movie, and get popcorn thrown at them. Charlie’s glare to their back neighbours stops the hate speech they had started to toss after the popcorn, freezes it in their throats. 

  
  


They have remembered to bring tissues for the big finale, this time, and sniffle through it, smiling.

  
  


They walk out of the theatre hand in hand. Charlie stops with her eyes on the cardboard cut-outs in the hall. “I love you,” she tells Cam.

  
  


Cam bumps into her shoulder and, the feelings the movie stirred up still swirling in her chest, draws Charlie into her arms. “I will love you always,” she vows.

  
  


“Get a room!” someone calls.

  
  


Cam glares. It’s the couple that sat behind them. They scuttle away.

  
  


“Want to get drinks?” asks Charlie.

  
  


“Like this?” asks Cam.

  
  


“Exactly like this,” says Charlie, and because shame flees when her sister challenges her, Cam goes.

When, three hours later, a more sloshed Charlie says “Want to get a tattoo?” Cam goes along too, because what is caution in the face of the uninhibited love between two drunken sisters. When she sobers up, Cam shows off her new tattoo proudly, because she has never apologised for loving her sister.

5.

The trial is a farce, after Charlie plays whistleblower. She’s convicted, because she was already in purgatory, her job supposed to be her atonement for the folly of youth.

  
  


They refuse Cam a moment to say goodbye.

When they take Charlie away, in cuffs, she looks over her shoulder. Cam locks eyes with her and keeps them steady, the promise silent between them.

You are my sister. 

At no point during the trial have they asked for their parents to come. It has been years since either of them has been in touch.

Cam will never apologise for her sister, and her parents did. All the time.

She walks out of the courtroom, head high. Staring eyes burning into her like a thousand needles. At this point, she is a veteran. She will never apologise. 

After this day, she will also hoard the truth of her sister, the treasure she is, like a dragon.

+1 

Cam had been keeping an eye on Max’s sister, who had shed some of her Stepford Wife mentality in the wake of her husband’s disappearance, but still regularly broke out the middle-class rudeness she had patiently trained out of her former work partner.  
  
They were seated in a booth at the Crashdown, two baskets of fries in the middle of the table, half-eaten burgers in front of everyone. Max, the dope, had eaten his as fast as he could, one eye on his girlfriend behind the counter. He was barricaded by his sister, however, who refused to pay attention to his scraping his throat and continued to eat her burger slowly. 

  
  


Isobel’s eyes had mostly been fixed on Charlie, seated opposite her. 

  
  


Charlie had been staring right back, eyebrow of intrigue the slightest bit raised.

  
  


Cam had a bad feeling about this. Especially when she felt her sister’s legs move, her thigh bunching and stretching in response to some unseen motion. 

  
  


Two hands reached for fries at the same time. Rather than retreat, Isobel’s fingers lingered over the top of Charlie’s as she grasped a fry artfully and popped it into her mouth between suggestively rounded lips. 

Isobel had rested her chin in one hand, the fingers of which played loosely over the lower half of her face. Charlie watched it avidly. Cam felt some sympathy for Max, who was massaging his forehead by this point.  
  
Eventually, Isobel asked. “How do you feel about pedicures?”

“ Pedicures?” asked Charlie puzzled, who had about as much interest in them as Cam, which was to say none.   
  
“ Hm, or a manicure. Me giving you one,” Isobel said, voice lingering on the pronouns.  
  
“ ...Yeah. Okay,” said Charlie, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was agreeing too, but game all the same. 

“ Some quality girl time.” Isobel’s eyes shot to Cam. “Just the two of us.”  
  
When they had stood up and left, a pained Max ground out. “I sincerely apologise for my sister. She can be… very direct.”  
  
Cam eyed him. He was as pathetic as when he tried to get her to proofread his reports, in exchange for steak, like they were works of literature. She laughed at him gently, as she usually did.


End file.
